Steve Litchfield muses on the Java games scene and reviews two smartphone titles that have caught his eye, with FreeFlight, a full 3D flight sim and Odesys Backgammon Lite, a polished Backgammon implementation. And they're both 100% free. I take back everything (well, most of the things) I ever said about Java....

"I have to confess I've always been a bit 'down' over Java games on the smartphone. Partly because of the RAM needed by the Java runtime - having to sacrifice 10MB of RAM to run up a game and seeing your Web browser, Contacts and Calendar all close down in the background was a hassle. And partly because the ambition of Java-based games used to be quite low, with amateurish graphics and gameplay.

All this is changing though. For starters, the Java runtime is more efficient under Symbian OS, taking 'only' 8MB or so, plus most S60 3rd Edition devices now have at least 21MB of RAM free after booting and even allowing for Web and PIM apps and usual OS processes, there's often enough in the background to run up a Java game and not 'lose' anything from your set of multitasking applications."

Read on...